Book Reviews

Joseph T. Stanik, El Dorado Canyon: Reagan’s Undeclared with Quaddaª. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2002. 316 pp. $34.95.

Reviewed by Nathan Alexander, Harvard University

Suicide bombers, preemptive strikes, and biological are now part of America’s security lexicon. The “war on terrorism” after September 2001 and Presi- dent George W. Bush’s “preemptive” attack against Iraq have seemingly eclipsed the concerns of the (détente, , and the like). Some observers argue that the possible use of “weapons of mass destruction” by al Qaeda or other terrorist groups poses a graver threat now than the Soviet Union’s deployment of SS-20 missiles did in the late 1970s and early 1980s. International terrorism is often depicted as a new menace of the post–Cold War era. Yet the reality is that terrorism was more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s than it is today. Although the attack on the World Trade Center was visually spectacular, al Qaeda’s threat to the United States is actually less than the danger that Italy faced in the 1970s when confronting the Red Brigades, which nearly wiped out the Italian government. In El Dorado Canyon: Reagan’s Undeclared War with Qaddaª, Joseph Stanik pro- vides two historical antecedents for the 2003 war in Iraq. The ªrst is America’s conºict with the Barbary pirates, who harassed American and European shipping in the seven- teenth and early eighteenth centuries off the coast of northern Africa. The American government paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and other tribute to the pirates as ransom for American ships and sailors. Thomas Jefferson had opposed these payments long before he became president, and after he ascended to the presidency in 1801 he dispatched U.S. warships to protect American vessels and eventually to assault Tripoli harbor itself. The attack (and half a dozen others) failed, but a subsequent effort, com- bined with those of the Europeans, forced the pasha of Tripoli to accept a treaty in 1805. (Not until 1815, however, after further naval victories over Algiers, was the United States able to put a complete end to its tribute payments.) The second precedent, which is the focus of the book, is the U.S. relationship with Libya during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Stanik, a former naval ofªcer, provides an account of the Reagan administration’s decision-making process and a narrative of U.S. military operations against Libya in 1986. The latter are conveyed with great drama, and Stanik’s grasp of the minutiae of naval weaponry and the escala- tion of military tactics is masterful. After Reagan came to ofªce, he ordered more ag- gressive rules of engagement to facilitate the “calculated application of force” (p. 42). Dogªghts between U.S. F-14s and Libyan MiGs broke out over the Gulf of Sidra, as the U.S. military began to challenge the Libyan leader, Moammar Qadafª, more di- rectly. Hostilities culminated in a U.S. raid against Libya, codenamed Operation El Dorado Canyon, in April 1986. Stanik’s gripping narrative of the raid reads like a Tom Clancy novel. U.S. F-111 bombers ºew from their bases in Britain through the blackness toward their Libyan targets. In the meantime, U.S. carrier-based ªghters,

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which were responsible for eliminating Libyan ground defenses immediately before the arrival of the F-111s, coordinated their attacks with the bombers and struck Tri- poli simultaneously. The narrative conveys a striking image of the U.S. pilots, desper- ate for fuel, jostling with one another in the air to get access to aerial refueling tankers. Unable to break radio silence, they could not locate the giant KC-10A Extenders and KC-135R Stratotankers that would keep them from crashing into the sea. An F-111 pilot ªnally solved the problem by doing a “little torching,” as he dumped some fuel and ignited it with his afterburner, “creating a huge explosion that both lit up the sky and pointed the direction to the tanker” (p. 196). All but one F-111 returned safely to the RAF Lakenheath base in the United Kingdom. Operation El Dorado Canyon is not just about America’s military engagement with Libya. As the subtitle indicates, it is also about what Stanik believes to be Rea- gan’s counterterrorist political strategy. Stanik attempts to situate the Libyan airstrike in this broader, strategic perspective. From the outset, Stanik writes, Reagan commit- ted his administration to a war against terrorism. This policy “consisted in a variety of things: diplomatic and economic sanctions, covert operations and demonstrations of military power” (p. 196), culminating in Operation El Dorado Canyon. It was, as Reagan declared following the release of U.S. hostages from Iran on the day of his inauguration, a policy of “swift and effective retribution” (p. 33). Reagan’s political strategy toward terrorism, however, was hardly as systematic as the military activities that make up roughly half of Stanik’s book. Although Reagan imposed “major” economic sanctions against Libya in early 1982, “ironically, Amer- ica’s commercial relationship with Libya had expanded...[and] during the ªrst months of 1985 reached $260 million, a nearly 60 percent increase over the same pe- riod of the year before” (p. 111). Despite efforts to convince U.S. allies that Qadafª’s activities posed a threat, “by 1986 when the US had to confront [Libya] it found itself alone (p. xi).” Moreover, despite signing a formidable number of National Security documents authorizing everything from preemptive “murders of terrorists” (the Rea- gan administration argued that murdering terrorists was not the same as assassinating them and that only assassinations, not murders, were prohibited by an executive order, p. 94) to preemptive military raids against terrorist organizations and the states that supported them (NSDD 138), Reagan in practice implemented very little. Most un- settling was the reaction of Libya and terrorist organizations to Operation El Dorado Canyon. A “spasm of anti-western violence,” including the execution of a number of Westerners, occurred immediately after the U.S. military action. On New Year’s Day 1989, U.S. ªghter planes were engaged by Libyan MiGs shortly after Reagan accused Libya of constructing a large chemical weapons plant at Rabta. Ten days before that, on 21 December 1988, a PanAm ºight was brought down over Lockerbie by a bomb planted by Libyan intelligence ofªcials, an event that might have provided an alterna- tive, grimmer ending to Stanik’s book. Operation El Dorado Canyon clearly was written with the events of September 2001 in mind. It concludes by drawing a parallel between Ronald Reagan’s call for “swift and effective retribution” and George W. Bush’s demand that the Taliban “act to

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hand over...terrorists, or...share in their fate.” (p. 241). The current war against terrorism, Stanik believes, ªnds its origin in Ronald Reagan’s war on terrorism during the 1980s. In contrast to the clarity of Stanik’s military narrative, the political story he is try- ing to tell is much more ambiguous. It relies heavily on the coherence of the military narrative to give it a sense of focus. When Stanik declares that Operation El Dorado Canyon achieved its goals, it is unclear which goals he has in mind: the political objec- tive of eliminating terrorism, or the military objective of blowing up Qadafª’s military arsenals. The ªrst goal obviously was not achieved, and even the second was achieved only partly. The Reagan administration’s lack of clarity in its policy toward terrorism stemmed from its hesitation to distinguish between localized violence and the broader conºict with the Soviet Union (pp. 35, 40–41). Many of the provocative yet disparate military and diplomatic actions the Reagan administration directed at Libya may also be seen as part of a wider, more belligerent attitude toward the Soviet Union and its client states. Most likely, the Reagan administration’s halting policy toward Libya was the result of these often overlapping objectives. Terrorism during the Cold War was at once global and speciªc. A policy toward it was necessarily ambiguous. The U.S. military confrontation with Iraq in March–April 2003, justiªed in part by allegations of Saddam Hussein’s terrorist connections, included military operations that were at least as efªcient and decisive as those chronicled by Stanik. But it is also true that Bush was following Reagan’s example by taking on Iraq without the support of some traditional U.S. allies and without a clear indication of whether the U.S. ob- jective was to ªght a speciªc terrorist group (al Qaeda) or to confront a more global (and ambiguous) menace. In that sense, U.S. military prowess in Iraq provided a spec- tacular but ultimately short-lived way of confronting a perceived threat. The thorny postwar situation in Iraq makes clear that the three-week conºict in March–April 2003 was not the last chapter in America’s war against terrorism.

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James Jay Carafano, Waltzing into the Cold War: The Struggle for Occupied Austria. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002. 249 pp.

Reviewed by Günter Bischof, University of New Orleans

This well-written, ªrst-rate study ought to carry a title like Cold War Secrecy: The American Militarization of Occupied Austria after II. The book’s stereotypi- cal title evoking a Strauss operetta is a misnomer; there was nothing light-hearted “in three-quarters time” about the over Austria’s secret rearmament. Carafano hardly touches on the complex international negotiations that led to the Austrian state treaty—one of the most vexing issues in the East-West conºict. He skims over Aus-

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